*Educate! Amuse! And In Colors! - Exposición

The Marjorie G. and Carl W. Stern Book Arts and Special Collections Center of the San Francisco Public Library cordially invites you to view a selection of over eighty picture books from the Fox Collection featuring 19th century color printing, especially color wood engraving and chromolithographs. Highlights include “toy” and “moveable” books; work from the shop of Edmund Evans and many examples of fine British chromolithographs from the firms of Thomas Nelson & Sons, Frederick Warne, Dean & Son and George Routledge & Sons. Early hand-colored images are included as well.

The exhibition opening will be celebrated with a lecture on Saturday, January 5th, at 2pm in the Koret Auditorium on the Lower Level of the Main Library. Guest speaker, Laura E. Wasowicz, Curator of Children's Literature from the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, will discuss the McLoughlin Brothers printing firm of New York and their influence on 19thcentury American color printing. Her talk is entitled McLoughlin Brothers: Nineteenth-Century Entrepreneurs and Innovators of the American Picture Book.

The AAS owns an extensive collection of McLoughlin Brothers materials including original drawings and prints, picture books, paper dolls, games, correspondence, catalogs, price lists, and manuscripts. The title of the exhibit Educate! Amuse! And In Colors! is taken from advertising copy found in their catalogs.

The Fox Collection includes more than 2,000 early British and American children's books many of which were drawn from the file copies of the McLoughlin Brothers publishers of New York. The collection was generously donated to the library in 1978 by book collector Mr. George M. Fox of Charlemont, Massachusetts and is on view to the public for the first time since then.